Absolution: A Novel, Volume 10In his dazzling literary debut in the English language, Olafur Johann Olafsson - one of Iceland's preeminent and best-selling writers of fiction - gives us the putative memoirs of an Icelandic expatriate living in New York in the autumn of his life, a degenerate, self-styled captain of industry and aesthete who has endured two failed marriages and whose children are "a testimony to a mistake". Peter Peterson is a man racked by nightmares of a crime of passion he may have committed half a century ago out of unrequited love, a crime that has shaped the rest of his life. His memoirs - a confession ranging from his placid bourgeois boyhood in Reykjavik, to his days as a student in Nazi-occupied Denmark, to his ferocious rise as an immigrant entrepreneur in New York - are refracted not only through his paranoia, manipulativeness, vanity, crazed cynicism, and wry humor, but also through the sensibility of a compulsive fellow countryman who has translated and edited Peterson's scribblings in the settling of Peterson's estate - and who might have made them very much his own. Sly, highly intelligent, and lucid, Absolution is a brilliant anatomy of obsession, desire, and self-deception. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Andreas Klotz asked back home began body bottle calm chair cheek Christmas Christmas lights cigarette coffee cognac cold Copenhagen Danish dark Denmark Disa door dream dress drink enjoy everything eyes face Father feel felt fingers Frissi gin and tonic girl glass gone goodbye Gudrún Gullfoss half past hand Hannes head hear heard Helgi Herr Metzenauer Hjalmur hope Iceland imagine John Lazarus knew leave light little crime looked morning Mother never night o'clock ÓLAFUR JÓHANN ÓLAFSSON Pauillac Perhaps Pete Peter Peterson Petsamo Pétur Pétur Pétursson pocket rain realized remember restaurant Rovaniemi schnapps silent sitting sleep smile sometimes stay stood stopped Storvik street Strřget summer sure talk taxicabs tell There's thing thought told tomorrow tonight took turned Vesterbro voice wait walked watch week window wine woman